Reading

Interpreting Characters: The Heart of Story  

During this unit, students will:

• learn to establish powerful reading lives (inside and outside of the classroom).

• learn to think deeply about characters (growing ideas about characters, craft, and language).

• learn to use text evidence to support the ideas we grow about characters.

• read in partnerships to discuss their thinking.

Reading the Weather, Reading the World   

During this unit, students will:

• learn to read for main ideas and supporting details, to identify text structure, to summarize, to synthesize, to analyze author’s craft, and to figure out meanings of unknown words.

• understand the text features of nonfiction that help develop a sense for text content.

  • diagrams

  • captions

  • images

  • charts

• learn ways to organize information based on the structure of the text.

  • T Chart–Problem/Solution, Cause/Effect, Question/Answer

  • Venn Diagram–Compare/Contrast

  • Timeline–Sequence

  • Sketch

• work in research groups studying extreme weather and natural disasters.

Detail and Synthesis: Close Reading of Fiction 

During this unit, students will:

• think carefully about how they read fiction, set new goals, learn the importance of rereading, and talk deeply about big ideas.

•  focus on studying characters to develop sophisticated themes.

• compare and contrast texts in different ways: how characters respond to problems, how similar themes are developed differently across texts

Historical Fiction Book Clubs

During this unit, students will:  

• synthesize the evolving settings with plotlines and subplots of the texts.

• get a sense that the setting is not just a physical place, but an emotional place, paying attention to the mood.

• focus on interpretation–this builds on the work that students did in Interpreting Characters: The Heart of the Story.

• draft, revise, elaborate on possible interpretations of the texts.

Poetry

During this unit, students will:

• read a variety of poems.

• learn about poetic devices.

Reading History: The American Revolution

During this unit, students will:

• use text structures to organize incoming information, including primary sources.

• recognize different points of view and finding evidence to support claims, leading to debate.

• Read history for universal messages and for meaning